When driving a vehicle, the behavior of the surrounding vehicles can sometimes act as a preview or warning for unseen hazards in the road. For example, if a leading vehicle suddenly swerves to avoid a large pothole or piece of debris in the road, then this can act as a warning to trailing vehicles that there is an unseen hazard for which preparations should be made, even though the hazard is not currently in the field of view of the trailing vehicles. Other examples also exist where the behavior of the surrounding vehicles—whether they be leading vehicles out in front of a host vehicle or side-by-side vehicles that surround a host vehicle—can be useful to predict and prepare for upcoming situations that cannot be directly sensed by the host vehicle. This may be particularly true when the host vehicle is operating in some type of autonomous or semi-autonomous driving mode, such as those employed by adaptive cruise control systems, lane-centering systems, automatic lane change systems, freeway-limited autonomous driving systems, etc.